The Vulture Is a Blue-Collar Bad Guy Who Has Beef With Tony Stark

One the most appealing aspects of Spider-Man is that he truly is an everyman hero. He’s not a billionaire genius or literal Norse god, he’s just a kid from Queens. Well, it turns out that Spidey’s foe in the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming, Michael Keaton’s Vulture, is an everyman bad guy. And, as revealed in a new interview with some of the filmmakers, the Vulture has a serious bone to pick with one of the MCU’s elite heroes: Tony Stark.

USA Today reports that the Vulture, aka Adrian Toomes, is a blue-collar guy who operates a salvaging company in New York that cleans up the damage caused by superhero battles. Things are going okay for his business since there are a lot of superhero battles, but it all goes wrong after a government organization founded by Tony Stark takes over his contract.

Co-producer Eric Hauserman Carroll said the slight spurs Toomes to reinvent himself as “the dark Tony Stark,” and he starts gathering found alien technology to sell to the criminal underworld so he can be rich like Tony.

“He thinks once he has this money and power, he’ll have more control of his life,” Carroll said.

“Some people see themselves as victims — he sees himself a little bit like that,” Keaton told USA Today of his character. “He probably would have a strong argument that he never got a fair shot — a lot of ‘Why not me? Where’s mine?’”

“I like the idea that in these huge movies, you pick out one extra and you’re like, ‘What does he think of all this?’” Watts explained. “Sometimes these movies are so casual about just destroying whole cities and incredible things happen and everyone’s like, ‘Eh, whatever.’ If that really happened, it would be amazing and change everything.”

Presumably, all this everyman, ground-level talk means that the third act of Homecoming won’t involve averting the literal destruction of the world. Hooray for lower, relatable stakes!